Play Bigger Quotes

“the failures are a feature, not a bug.”
― Al Ramadan, Play Bigger: How Pirates, Dreamers, and Innovators Create and Dominate Markets – A Silicon Valley Guide to Category Design for Building Legendary Companies

“The story about your business is more important than the facts about your business. Sound outrageous? Maybe, but the brain research proves it’s true. People relate to and remember stories—even people who make a living analyzing facts.”
― Al Ramadan, Play Bigger: How Pirates, Dreamers, and Innovators Create and Dominate Markets – A Silicon Valley Guide to Category Design for Building Legendary Companies

“A POV has to shift people’s minds so they reject an old way of thinking and come to believe in something new. It has to reach people on an emotional level. No one remembers what you say—but they remember how you made them feel. That feeling can be excitement about something that’s coming, or fear of missing out. Some of the best POVs make people think: “Oh fuck, I don’t have one of those! I have to get one of those!” To reach people’s emotions, a POV has to sound the way people talk. It has to be simple, direct, visceral. Language matters”
― Al Ramadan, Play Bigger: How Pirates, Dreamers, and Innovators Create and Dominate Markets – A Silicon Valley Guide to Category Design for Building Legendary Companies

“1.​Can you explain to me like a five-year-old what problem you’re trying to solve? 2.​If your company solves this problem perfectly, what category are you in? 3.​If you win 85 percent of that category, what’s the size of your category potential?”
― Al Ramadan, Play Bigger: How Pirates, Dreamers, and Innovators Create and Dominate Markets – A Silicon Valley Guide to Category Design for Building Legendary Companies

“Part of being a category king is having the courage to be nonconsensus.”
― Al Ramadan, Play Bigger: How Pirates, Dreamers, and Innovators Create and Dominate Markets – A Silicon Valley Guide to Category Design for Building Legendary Companies

“Vision mission: What was the original market or technology insight that led you to create this company? Customers: Who do you envision buying this product or service? Who will use it? Problem statement: What’s the problem you think you can solve for your potential customers? Use cases: What are the specific ways people will use this product or service to solve their problem? Product/solution: Give a detailed explanation of the technology behind the solution—what does it do now, and what else is it capable of doing? Ecosystem: In many cases there are other companies involved in solving the problem or adding additional value. These companies form an ecosystem around the problem and solution. What are all the companies and where in the ecosystem are the control points where one company has leverage? Competition: Who else is trying to solve this problem—or, if no one else sees the problem yet, who might jump in to compete with you to solve the problem once you identify it? Business model: How will your product or service change business for your customers? Will it increase their return on investment or reduce costs in a significant way? Or does it allow them to do something that couldn’t have been done with prior technology, creating huge value? Sales and go-to-market: Enterprise companies should articulate how the product or solution will make its way to the market. Through a sales force? Through distribution partners? Both? For a consumer company, how will users find out about your solution? From app stores? Search? Viral adoption? Growth hacking techniques? Advertising? PR? Organization: How is the company organized? Who are the major influencers on the company? How are decisions made? What kind of culture will work? Funding strategy: What’s the next funding event? A private financing? An IPO? How much runway does the company have before it needs more money and what kind of funding is in place to execute against the category strategy?”
― Al Ramadan, Play Bigger: How Pirates, Dreamers, and Innovators Create and Dominate Markets – A Silicon Valley Guide to Category Design for Building Legendary Companies

“Some of the great category kings have been built during some of the “worst” times—Google in the early 2000s right after the dot-com crash; Airbnb in 2008 as financial markets melted; Birds Eye amid the Great Depression.6”
― Al Ramadan, Play Bigger: How Pirates, Dreamers, and Innovators Create and Dominate Markets – A Silicon Valley Guide to Category Design for Building Legendary Companies

“Listen to [customers] so that you understand what the root problem is rather than just doing the solution, because if we just do what we’re told, they wouldn’t need us, and if they didn’t need us, we wouldn’t be able to generate the kind of profitability and competitive advantage that it takes to define a category.”
― Al Ramadan, Play Bigger: How Pirates, Dreamers, and Innovators Create and Dominate Markets – A Silicon Valley Guide to Category Design for Building Legendary Companies

“he positioned Salesforce as the anti-Siebel. He wanted his company to be seen as the pirates storming Siebel’s fortress.”
― Al Ramadan, Play Bigger: How Pirates, Dreamers, and Innovators Create and Dominate Markets – A Silicon Valley Guide to Category Design for Building Legendary Companies

“The End of Software.” The phrase would become Salesforce’s mantra. The company even designed a clever “No Software!”
― Al Ramadan, Play Bigger: How Pirates, Dreamers, and Innovators Create and Dominate Markets – A Silicon Valley Guide to Category Design for Building Legendary Companies

“K. Rowling did the same, inventing an intellectual young-adult fiction category and making herself the category king. The”
― Al Ramadan, Play Bigger: How Pirates, Dreamers, and Innovators Create and Dominate Markets – A Silicon Valley Guide to Category Design for Building Legendary Companies

“It’s about winning the war for popular opinion, teaching the world to abandon the old and embrace the new.”
― Al Ramadan, Play Bigger: How Pirates, Dreamers, and Innovators Create and Dominate Markets – A Silicon Valley Guide to Category Design for Building Legendary Companies

“Groupthink Bias brings momentum to an emerging category king”
― Al Ramadan, Play Bigger: How Pirates, Dreamers, and Innovators Create and Dominate Markets – A Silicon Valley Guide to Category Design for Building Legendary Companies

“winning companies today market the problem, not just the solution.”
― Al Ramadan, Play Bigger: How Pirates, Dreamers, and Innovators Create and Dominate Markets – A Silicon Valley Guide to Category Design for Building Legendary Companies

“becomes much easier—much clearer—for people to think primarily in terms of the problem they want to solve. In that sense, a problem is a category.”
― Al Ramadan, Play Bigger: How Pirates, Dreamers, and Innovators Create and Dominate Markets – A Silicon Valley Guide to Category Design for Building Legendary Companies

“didn’t develop the public’s demand for this solution,”
― Al Ramadan, Play Bigger: How Pirates, Dreamers, and Innovators Create and Dominate Markets – A Silicon Valley Guide to Category Design for Building Legendary Companies

“In any category of product or service, one entity gets to be the big and valuable dog, while all the rest wind up in the economically challenging tail.”
― Al Ramadan, Play Bigger: How Pirates, Dreamers, and Innovators Create and Dominate Markets – A Silicon Valley Guide to Category Design for Building Legendary Companies

“avoiding the risk of the experimental software fucking up everything else on the machine.”
― Al Ramadan, Play Bigger: How Pirates, Dreamers, and Innovators Create and Dominate Markets – A Silicon Valley Guide to Category Design for Building Legendary Companies

“As Christensen pointed out in Innovator’s Dilemma, listening to customers leads you to constantly build better, but never to build different. And different is what creates new categories. Better leads to a faster horse; different leads to a Model T.”
― Al Ramadan, Play Bigger: How Pirates, Dreamers, and Innovators Create and Dominate Markets – A Silicon Valley Guide to Category Design for Building Legendary Companies

“An advantage of publishing the category blueprint is that it seeds dread among would-be competitors, who look at the blueprint and think you’ve already put the whole thing in motion.”
― Al Ramadan, Play Bigger: How Pirates, Dreamers, and Innovators Create and Dominate Markets – A Silicon Valley Guide to Category Design for Building Legendary Companies

“Whether you’re a tiny start-up seeking angel money, a growing company going for a B round, or an IPO candidate, a POV will be the best investor relations tool you’ll ever have.”
― Al Ramadan, Play Bigger: How Pirates, Dreamers, and Innovators Create and Dominate Markets – A Silicon Valley Guide to Category Design for Building Legendary Companies